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Don Schindler

Executive Reputation Coach & Digital Marketer

Tag: facebook 101

Teach someone how to use Facebook over the holidays – Facebook 101

teach-facebook-gift

What do you want for Christmas?

Who wouldn’t want to spend their holidays teaching relatives how to use social networking?

Remember the benefits

  • less mass emails
  • less calls wondering how you are doing
  • there’s more of a chance of them talking to others besides just concentrating on you

I’ve recently completed a five-part Facebook 101 course.  It goes through all the basics so you don’t have to figure it out for yourself.

So if you are teaching your kids, your grandma, or your crazy uncle, this is a good reference.  Now granted it is geared to a farmer audience but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use the same techniques.

Part 1 – How do you sign for Facebook?

Part 2 – How should you change your Facebook security and privacy settings?

Part 3 – How to friend someone on Facebook (and put them in a list)?

Part 4 – How do you post to Facebook?

Part 5 – What should you be posting on Facebook?

If there is any part I missed, please let me know.  I’ll be happy to add or answer your questions.

Have a blessed Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas!

 

What should you be posting on Facebook? Facebook 101 – Part 5

cow-grazing

Photo courtesy of Kevin Walsh (flickr)

When it comes to joining and then posting to Facebook, many people don’t give it a second thought.

I believe that most people think “Wow, here’s a great way to get my awesome thoughts out on the internet. So many people think I’m hilarious and upbeat – I can’t wait for so many people to respond to my awesomeness.”

Well, maybe not quite that but something along those lines. They post because they want others to notice they are posting. I’m here and I have something to say.

Unfortunately, they may say something positive and get a little response but then they experiment with negativity or a rant and they get a lot of response.

Or they post something racy and get a lot of response. But is this response what you really want others to think of you?

Facebook, like every digital social network, is building a digital image of yourself. You determine that image just like you do with your actions in the real world.

Like what you do, what you say, who you associate with, what your job is, where you go to church or if you go at all. All these things tell others about you.

So don’t count Facebook out of this. You will project an image no matter what you do – it can be viewed in a positive light or a negative one. That’s up to you.

Farmers have a great reputation with the masses.
They see you as hardworking, trustworthy, friendly – some of the best of what America has to offer. Why do you think that Dodge spent that much money on a Super Bowl ad associating their trucks with the American Farmer?

Check out the Dodge ad and the following Gallup Poll. It was a smart move and a great ad, by the way. Don’t know if it sold more trucks for them.

gallup-poll-aug-2013-farmers

Courtesy of Gallup

So why am I saying all of this?

Because I want you to be careful about your digital reputation – you, as the individual farmer, represent all farmers online. That’s why I think that maintaining that reputation of your name and the name of all other farmers is above all the mission.

So when posting to your Facebook profile, here are my tips for maintaining that solid reputation of being helpful, hardworking, smart and true to your families, animals and land.

 

1. Be positive and uplifting.

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Posts should be helpful and realistic. I’m not talking about only posting Biblical or inspirational quotes. I’m talking about if something happens – even if it’s not something that you are happy about – put it in the context of how this could benefit my friends. Rants rarely benefit anyone and can sometimes cause more damage.

TIP – If you have to rant, go ahead and do it. Do it where it’s not going to be seen by the masses (like a word doc) and let yourself vent. Then sit on it for a while. Think about who is really going to benefit from this and who’s it going to hurt. If you really think you need to post it, send it to a good friend first to see what they think.

2. Don’t argue with others.

This is my only “don’t” in my tips. I have a post about how to win an argument that you should read if you think you really need to go to battle with someone online. It’s just three simple steps.

 

3. Know what your friends on Facebook like to see and tie that to what you would like them to know about you.

How do you do this? Well, most likely your friends are a lot like you in what they like to share, comment on and like.

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So when I create something, I look at it and think “would I share this?” If it’s something I don’t think I would share, then I start over. BTW, not everything you do will get people to respond. Just keep trying. The good thing is that farmers have a lot of content just hanging around the barn that people find pretty dang interesting.

 

4. Help others.

Help others with what?

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The questions they have about farming, the food you produce, how the animals are doing, what farm like is really like.

They seriously want to know and you can tell them via stories, photos, videos, etc…

If you say that “no one asks you questions”, I’ll find that hard to believe. It doesn’t seem to matter where I go people have questions about farming (like I could answer them – I don’t but I send them to farmers that can) and what’s it like to work with dairy farmers (pretty awesome in my opinion).

 

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Another help is recipes.

I don’t post a lot of recipes but many people do and they get great responses from the recipes of simple home cooked meals using the great products you produce like cheese, milk, butter, ice cream and yogurt.

 

food-groups

Join groups.

If you are struggling to find things to talk about, join some groups and listen to their conversations. They can help you find what they need answers to and how you can join the conversation.

 

 

5. Always be interesting.

How can you be interesting? There are tons of good ways using the new digital tools at your disposal.

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Use photos – use your smartphone to take farm life photos. People love to share them and talk about the animals or the farmscapes.

TIP – if you want a lot of comments or shares on your photos, ask people to give you a caption for the photo or let them fill in the blank (it’s hard to resist filling in a blank – people like being clever).

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Use videos – use your smartphone to take YouTube videos, a Vine and Instagram. Same as the top part

Just take a few seconds to give us a status update of what’s going on on the farm – you’ve been given the statistics of how many people are NOT involved in agriculture. Now you can share your view of the farm and life on it.

 

6. Give credit to others.

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Share what others have posted. Comment on their posts. Liking is fine but it’s not going to help pass along a post to others.

When you pass along other’s information, they know it. They appreciate it and hopefully they will pass along your posts in the future. It doesn’t always happen but the golden rule can be very effective in social media because we are notified when people play by it.

 

7. Use hashtags.

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If you would like to meet new people in Facebook or get your postings seen by others besides your immediate circle of friends and friends of friends. Using them might seem a little weird but it’s still new. You can also follow other people’s hashtags.

So what are some of your favorite tips for posting?

How to friend someone on Facebook (and put them in a list) Facebook 101 – Part 3

When it comes to communicating with multiple friends in one location, it doesn’t get much easier than Facebook.

You can add family, friends, co-workers, acquaintances, your church and people you meet at events and conferences. But the problem you’ll run into is that a lot of times you don’t want to communicate with all of them at the same time with the same message.

In this way, Facebook really sucks.  Everyone is lumped together and their algorithm for sorting who my good friends are vs. my occasion friends vs. my co-workers ain’t the best way to determine who’s important in my life.  But there’s a way to fix Facebook so it is really useful to you and your farm or business.

Setting up your “friends” on Facebook requires some thought but you’ll get the most benefit out of Facebook if you use these simple tips on when “friending” people on Facebook.

1. Search for friends on Facebook

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Using the search box at the top of your Facebook newsfeed, simple type in their name and click the magnifying glass.

Now if your friend you are looking for doesn’t come up, there are ways to search for people. If you have the email address or phone number, you can also look up people (if they didn’t change their privacy settings).

You can type “People I know.”

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And use the advanced search that will come up on the side. It looks like this.

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2. Add Friends

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You can add a friend from search by clicking the Add Friend button

Once you find your potential friend, you can request the friend by clicking “Add Friend”. You should then get a message that says “Friend Request Sent.”

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Or if you are on their profile page, you can add a friend by clicking this button.

You’ll have to wait until they approve friendship before you’ll be able to see their status updates in your newsfeed, check out their full timeline or see other things that they may have blocked from the public.

3. Put them into a list

This is very important and it will make Facebook a much better communication tool and resource for yourself (now I know you are thinking I have a “Schindler’s List” but I don’t. But ha, ha, it’s very funny. Feel free to put me on a Schindler’s List if you want to.)

After they have approved your Friend Request, simply go to their profile and select the “Friends” button. A drop down menu should appear.

There are many different choices here.

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If the “friend” is a good friend and you want to keep close tabs on their activity on Facebook, you will want to select “Close Friends”. This will then add “Get Notifications” – you’ll be notified of most of their posting activity (Status Updates and Shares).

If the “friend” isn’t that close, then I recommend putting them in a list that you will create.

These lists will help you keep track of your friends instead of letting just the newsfeed do with with all your “friends”.

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You can add someone to a list simply by clicking the “Add to another list” in the drop down.

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With people that are good friends but not a “close friend”, then I would recommend creating an A-1 list. You can see how I added a friend to my A-1 list.

But if you don’t have an A-1 list, you can easily create one.

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Just scroll to the bottom of the list and create a new list.

Or you can use the “FRIENDS” navigation on the left hand side of the page (it should be near the bottom of our newsfeed page left hand side navigation.

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Click on “More” next to “FRIENDS” and you’ll be taken to the Friends page. On this page, you can create a list as well and start adding members.

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You’ll see I created an A-1 list and then started adding members.

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TIP – Now Facebook will still use its algorithm to determine who your friends are in the the custom list newsfeed but at least you’ll have a better chance of seeing your friends in a smaller list.

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After you’ve created your custom lists (like the A-1), then you can click on the pencil to the right of the list and add it to your Favorites section to the top of your left hand navigation. This way you don’t have to search for custom lists. BTW, I know this says remove but it’s because my A-1 is already in my Favorites.

facebook-friends-list-newsfeed

If you notice I have an Interests List called (Farmer Pages), an Interest List allows you to add both Pages and Profiles to the same list and follow it. We’ll discuss that more in a future post.

The lists will also show up on your Facebook phone app as well.  To find a list, just pull your newsfeed down (just like you do when you are refreshing the news) and you’ll see the custom lists there.  The more you use the lists, it will remember to keep those lists near the top.

facebook-mobile-app-lists

Next post we’ll go over how to post and what to post on Facebook.

If you have any tricks on using lists in Facebook just let me know and I’ll add them here.

How Should You Change Your Facebook Security and Privacy Settings? – Facebook 101 Part 2

person-of-interest-facebook

Image courtesy of CBS “Person of Interest” Facebook Pgae

There are plenty of concerns about Facebook privacy – and rightly so, you are probably going to share more information about yourself and your family, friends, coworkers, and your farm, then on any other platform.

I love the show, “Person of Interest” on CBS. It tells the story of a man who’s built a machine that spies on every person in the U.S. looking for terrorists. But after the man turned the machine over to the govt., he is now resolved to try and save the people that the machine predicts are going to die but the govt. doesn’t care about. Loss of privacy is the basis of the show.

With Facebook, you are giving it a lot of privacy if you choose to engage but if you understand a few basics then you shouldn’t have a problem with privacy.

I get asked this a lot but identity theft (as far as I understand it) happens mostly via banks and credit card companies than Facebook – they may find some information on you but all they really want is your username/password to your financials (which usually isn’t found on Facebook).

If you are worried about groups targeting you and your farm, I would also say that I have not heard of a single case of the group using their social media profiles to target physical addresses. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen – but what I would say is that if you have a large social media presence you are actually more of a threat to them because you will have so many people come to your (online – defending and promoting) aid if you have a issue on the farm.

First things first.

All the privacy and security settings in the world will not protect you if you say bad things on the internet. In fact, Facebook is one of the worst for keeping these things to yourself.

As my friend Katie Pinke of The Pinke Post  loves to say, “I don’t say anything on the internet that I wouldn’t want my grandmother to see.”

I completely agree with this statement.
Don’t go there.
Don’t argue with people.
Don’t flame others.
Be nice.
Be helpful.
You can voice your opinion about injustice without berating and crucifying others.

Remember you are in front of your audience, their audience and the entire Facebook public. And you can always walk away if it isn’t going well.

So let’s get into the Security and Privacy Settings so change a few things that will help protect your privacy but not completely cut you off from the rest of the world that may benefit quite a bit from hearing your wisdom about farming.

1. Click on the Gear to get to your Settings

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2. Select Account Settings

 

3. Select Username

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Change the username to something more appropriate than what Facebook gave you – if they gave you a long list of numbers (back in the day they did this).

4. Change Your Primary Email

Facebook gives you an email address like don.schindler (at) Facebook.com. I switch to the email that makes most sense to me.

That should be it for this screen unless you have an email address associated with a university. If so, you can set up one of their networks.

5. Go back to the left navigation and click Security

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6. Click “Secure Browsing” and make it “Enabled”

This will help protect you when you are using an open network like a coffee shop or airport. It helps keep people from hacking your account.

7. Click “Login Notifications” and make sure you set it to “Email” or “Text/Push Notifications”.

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This way you’ll be notified if someone is trying to log into your account from a different browser, phone, tablet, etc…

8. Recognized Devices and Active Sessions

These two areas will help you understand what has logged into your account last and where. If you have any active sessions from areas that you are unfamiliar then you should delete the sessions.

The other areas you can look into and Facebook does a good job of explaining them so I won’t do it here.

9. Click on Privacy

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10. Who can see your future posts?

This should be public. You can always change this on a specific post if you want only a certain list of friends or a specific friend/s or just yourself.

11. Review all your posts and things you’re tagged in.

This will link you to the activity log where you can review everything that you have done on Facebook – all your posts, likes, shares, comments, etc…

12. Limit the audience for posts you’ve shared with friends of friends or public?

This feature was developed so people could limit all of their old posts from “friends of friends” and “public” to switch “friends”. In other words, hid their past from anyone that wasn’t already a friend. I don’t recommend this unless you have damaging images and posts out there and you want them all invisible to the public.

13. Who can send you friend requests?

I marked this as everyone because I want to be able to be “friended” even if someone isn’t connected to one of my friends. This will not keep you out of search results – people just won’t be able to friend you if they aren’t a friend of one of your friends.

14. Whose messages do I want filtered into my Inbox?

I would recommend the “basic filtering” which means that most Facebook email messages will get to you.

15. Who can look you up using the email address you provided?

Now I give out my email address a lot for people to connect so I have this marked to public. If you want just “friends of friends” or just “friends” to be ale to do this you can.

TIP: Sometimes young people don’t want to be found by their parents on Facebook – they use an alias – but if you have their email and they haven’t changed this setting, you can find them on Facebook using this tool.

16. Who can look you up using the phone number you provided?

Same answer as the email address.

17. Do you want other search engines to link to your timeline?

Now this one is going to be different for me vs. you. I’m open on the internet and I want the search engines to find my information. You might not want that. So if you are worried about Google finding your information, then you might want to uncheck the box.

Next blog post – Timeline and Tagging (Facebook 101 – Part 3) Coming soon.

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